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Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

theregister.com

61–70 of 98 posts

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#61
post #15

Leadership - "All employees are required to use AI and be X% more productive" Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity. Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out. Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired. Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.

Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way , you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.

Why? They don't necessarily increase productivity at all [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44526912

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#62
post #15

Leadership - "All employees are required to use AI and be X% more productive" Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity. Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out. Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired. Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.

Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way , you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.

I haven't noticed coding assistance improving quality devs in a positive way outside of perhaps occasionally saving on typing speed... and those opportunities are few and far between

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#63
post #15

Leadership - "All employees are required to use AI and be X% more productive" Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity. Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out. Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired. Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.

Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way , you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.

That's only true if you're making CRUD software and easily replaceable by any random programmer. For anything more serious LLMs are only useful as a better search engine.

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#64
post #15

Leadership - "All employees are required to use AI and be X% more productive" Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity. Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out. Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired. Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.

Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way , you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.

This is crazy. I use copilot completions occasionally, but on average I think it's been productivity neutral so far. Sometimes it helps, but this is roughly offset by fruitless rabbit holes and straight-up wrong information.

One of my co-workers never uses any of it. For certain types of problems, he's the most productive member on the team.

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#65
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way , you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.

If you are submitting AI Slop code or overuse AI then you are a liability. If you don't use AI at all you might be 5 or 10% slower, but quality might well even make up for it.

I would say even more important than quality is just the fact that you will probably understand better. If an issue arises you will already know the intricacies while the AI slop engineer almost has to ask the AI again. They have got themselves stuck in a sort of slop cycle where after some time human understanding is completely out of the picture.

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#66
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you are submitting AI Slop code or overuse AI then you are a liability. If you don't use AI at all you might be 5 or 10% slower, but quality might well even make up for it.

I would say even more important than quality is just the fact that you will probably understand better. If an issue arises you will already know the intricacies while the AI slop engineer almost has to ask the AI again. They have got themselves stuck in a sort of slop cycle where after some time human understanding is completely out of the picture.

AI does not save anyone from having to know the fundamentals of software engineering and systems, but that’s orthogonal.

If you know them, AI supercharges you. If you don’t, you’re a lost cause no matter what.

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#68
post #15

Leadership - "All employees are required to use AI and be X% more productive" Employees find that AI tools are useless and don't increase productivity. Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out. Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired. Company does layoffs under the guise of "we replaced workers with AI" and the stock market rewards them for it.

> Leaders say - You are using the tools wrong. Figure it out.

> Employees now have to work longer hours or risk getting fired.

Bahahaha. In the best of all possible worlds.

Likely reality: Leaders say you're using the tools wrong, figure it out.

Employees: OK, so we train on the tools after hours?

Leaders: No.

Employees: Before hours?

Leaders: No.

Employees: During lunch?

Leaders: No.

Employees: Then when are we supposed to learn how to use the bloody tools?

Leaders: You're just going to have to figure that out for yourself.

Source: Happened to my mom when they moved from mainframe to Web-based at the insurance company.

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly at this point if you’re a dev and not using a coding assistant at all and in any possible way , you are indeed becoming a liability to your company. Now, Copilot (the assistant, not the GitHub coding one) is hot garbage compared to Claude/ChatGPT but that’s another story.

This is crazy. I use copilot completions occasionally, but on average I think it's been productivity neutral so far. Sometimes it helps, but this is roughly offset by fruitless rabbit holes and straight-up wrong information. One of my co-workers never uses any of it. For certain types of problems, he's the most productive member on the team.

> One of my co-workers never uses any of it. For certain types of problems, he's the most productive member on the team.

Sounds like he needs a PIP!

Re: Microsoft lets bosses spot teams that are dodging Copilot

#70

For context, this is the whole list of metrics measured by their Eye of Sauron tool, Viva Insights – it seems to be split between Outlook, Teams, Office, and Copilot data. The Outlook and Teams stuff seems to relate to time spent on their individual platforms, but the Copilot-by-app stuff is hilarious. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/viva/insights/advanced/ref... I look forward to the equivalent of a mouse jiggler.

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